Pillar of Fire (79 page)

 

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, late on the night of September 20, four Klansmen threw fourteen sticks of dynamite onto a porch, shattering the front rooms. “People grab whatever clothing they can find and run into the streets,” Dennis Sweeney wrote in a volunteer dispatch. “…It's Mama [Mrs. Alyene] Quin's house. It couldn't be worse. Everybody loves Mama Quin. She owns a popular cafe.” By the time rescuers pulled two young Quin children from beds beneath a collapsed ceiling—one with a punctured eardrum, the other with minor bruises—a second, more powerful bomb destroyed Society Hill Baptist, where C. C. Bryant was deacon. Bryant had been the only adult willing to sponsor SNCC's original registration project in Mississippi, from which Bob Moses retreated in 1961 with Hollis Watkins and Curtis Hayes as teenage disciples. The Quin Cafe had been their refuge.

 

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, student pickets of every description protested the closing of the Bancroft Strip the next morning: pacifists, religious clubs, civil rights groups, the YMCA, Youth for Goldwater. After a stalemate of some days over shifting issues, such as where the classroom started and stopped, several groups deliberately set up their information tables in the Bancroft Strip as before. Academic deans summoned five of them for peremptory discipline, whereupon nearly five hundred students signed a spontaneous petition of solidarity—“We have jointly manned the tables”—and marched into the administration building for the summary hearing at which the five, plus Savio and two others who organized the petition, were suspended. On the steps of Sproul Hall, when a professsor warned against “the continued, and I fear willful, breaking and violation of regulations,” a voice from the boisterous crowd shouted, “You have stated that the university must withstand the outside pressure. I maintain that the university is walking
hand in hand
with the outside pressure!” Cheers went up, along with cries of “Let Savio speak!”

In the tradition of Bob Moses, Savio entranced his peers with a meandering discourse on the distinction between legal and political neutrality. By banning the tables and solicitations, and insisting that off-campus speakers be regulated well in advance, he said, the Regents were stifling speech behind claims of law. “Let's say, for example—and this touches me very deeply—let's say that in McComb, Mississippi, some children are killed in the bombing of a church…. Let's say we have someone who's come up from Mississippi and wanted to speak here and he had to wait…. And everybody will have completely forgotten about those little children because, you know, when you're black and in Mississippi, nobody gives a damn….

“Now the issue is free speech,” Savio declared. He called restricted speech a symptom of larger anti-democratic jitters, saying “after that Tonkin Bay incident,” both presidential candidates quickly agreed that “Vietnam is not an issue in the campaign.” Therefore, voting Berkeley students “can't choose on what kind of foreign policy we want,” he argued, and it was only one step from there to matters of nuclear survival. “Now note—extremely important—the University of California is directly involved in making newer and better atom bombs,” he said. “Whether this is good or bad, don't you think…in the spirit of political neutrality…there should be some democratic control?”

Students caucused all night on the suspensions. Even while the Berkeley story remained confined to the campus newspaper, the
Daily Californian
, ramifications spread nationally within the movement from Savio's desire to be identified by his affiliation as “Chair, UC Campus Friends of SNCC.” At a summit meeting in Oakland, Friends of SNCC chapters that ardently supported Savio nevertheless questioned “official” use of the SNCC name as a touchy subject at the Atlanta headquarters, especially since the Atlantic City convention. The chairman of a Bay area confederation, himself a summer volunteer, argued that “wildcat” projects obscured SNCC's purpose, and that Friends of SNCC chapters must confine themselves to fund-raising for the Southern movement. Savio reluctantly agreed to curtail free speech about his own motivating identity.

 

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were more tender than ever since a notoriously failed New York truce meeting of civil rights organizations on September 18. Host Robert Spike of the National Council of Churches had scarcely finished his opening call for goodwill after Atlantic City—“let us try to avoid raking the coals of the past”—before Gloster Current of the NAACP attacked Mississippi SNCC workers in general as hotheaded “johnny-come-latelies” and Bob Moses in particular as a mumbling slacker who left “a very bad impression” on members of the NAACP Executive Board.

Backed by Andrew Young of SCLC, Spike pleaded again for peace to “eliminate the suspicion that exists among us,” but sniping erupted anyway. One SNCC representative protested a “diatribe against Bob and SNCC,” another invited the New York executives to relieve their snobbishness by attending a “low level meeting” with the common people of Mississippi. “I don't want to listen to [Pike County farmer E. W.] Steptoe,” Current indignantly replied. “We need a high level meeting to cut away the underbrush.” John Morsell, assistant director of the NAACP, defended his traditional hierarchy with a fond assurance well suited to Hoover's FBI: “We are bureaucratic. Many memos get to our desks and have to wait for our decisions.”

A clergyman from the National Council of Churches remarked on an “air of unreality” about the discussion, and Al Lowenstein stepped across the gulf with a procedural approach “to maximize cooperation” on Mississippi. “Right now decision making is metaphysical…,” he said. “We need structured democracy, not amorphous democracy.” SNCC leaders resented Lowenstein's criticism in part for its maddening grain of truth. Internally, political ambition tore at their informal traditions of brotherhood consent, with young veterans and newcomers alike pulling SNCC's name in many directions. Apprehensions worried SNCC's caretakers enough to summon Moses and James Forman home early from Africa.

Spike's clergy pushed hard as neutral facilitators for the disparate civil rights groups. Within forty hours of McComb's September 20 bombings, they transported Alyene Quin and two fellow victims from Mississippi to the Justice Department for a meeting with Burke Marshall, John Doar, and Lee White. Matti Dillon told them her husband, Willie, had been in jail since their home was bombed September 2, hauled off on the preposterous charge of running an illegal auto garage “when he doesn't even have a garage.” Ora Bryant told how her home had been bombed two months before her Society Hill Baptist Church, and Quin said she and her children had no place to stay in McComb: “Everyone's afraid to have me in their house now.” On behalf of the three women, Spike and other church officials “argued strenuously”—as Lee White put it in a memo—that the President himself should receive the three women to signal encouragement and resolve against the Klan siege. Johnson's advisers saw “no political benefit” in such an audience, saying that “as serious and as moving as the problem is in McComb, this is not the right time to use the President for this purpose.” Vowing to stay in Washington as long as necessary to get through, the redoubtable McComb women changed minds in the White House overnight. They met with columnist Drew Pearson, who adopted their cause. At a press conference, Alyene Quin dismissed public statements by the Pike County sheriff that she and other Negroes must be bombing their own homes: “Do you think I would work eleven years to keep a house and then plant a bomb under it while two of my children were in it?”

Presbyterian leader Eugene Carson Blake, Spike's chairman at the Commission on Religion and Race, told reporters that “nothing in the history of Christianity is comparable to the mass desecration of the houses of God in Mississippi.” Events built news pressure more than words. There were two more bombings on September 23, and McComb police jailed twenty-five movement supporters, including volunteer Dennis Sweeney, under a catchall new “criminal syndicalism” statute designed expressly against the summer project.

By Thursday morning, September 24, Lee White was preparing President Johnson for a brief addition to his schedule. “They are coming through the basement entrance and will leave the same way,” White advised, “although obviously they will tell the press about their visit here.” The three McComb women spent several minutes with Johnson at one o'clock, just after Chief Justice Earl Warren and his six commissioners formally delivered an advance copy of their report on the Kennedy assassination. Shrewdly, perhaps with background coaching from the Justice Department, the McComb-CORR delegation generated news stories proposing that President Johnson send Allen Dulles back to Mississippi: “New Dulles Mission Urged.” Mindful of his goading effect upon J. Edgar Hoover after the triple murders of June, McComb advocates pictured the ex-CIA director moving from his completed duties on the Warren Commission to investigate the “national shame” of unsolved Mississippi bombings.

 

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Johnson officials decided that Hoover was not the primary obstacle. Like the summer project itself, the new Jackson FBI office had trouble covering territory in southwest Mississippi, where fear was so pervasive that even stalwart segregationists felt the chill of Klan violence. A bomb went off in the yard of the Natchez mayor on a rumor that he favored hiring Negro workers at a new shopping center, and in Vicksburg, after a bomb demolished the COFO Freedom House, Mayor John Holland issued a written statement denying any slightest common bond with its occupants: “I never said they were good kids, or anything complementary [sic]….” To Mississippi FBI chief Roy Moore, already swamped under eight hundred cases a month, the Southwest was a low-priority area. Having been made to stick to his internal working conditions—that he would accept only agents motivated to volunteer for Mississippi,
*
not the usual draftees from FBI headquarters—Moore distributed arriving agents by triage. The Southwest got few, and federal sources instead planted threats of martial law that surfaced in a McComb newspaper on September 25.

Full-scale skirmishes were overwhelming Moore's major theater of operations in Neshoba County. All that week, on leads developed by the FBI task force under Inspector Joe Sullivan, Justice Department attorneys began hauling one hundred subpoenaed witnesses before a U.S. grand jury in Biloxi, whereupon a state grand jury in Neshoba County instantly called most of the same witnesses to ask what they were telling the feds. The two grand juries dueled. Judge O. H. Barnett introduced to the state grand jury as its investigative leader “the most courageous sheriff in all America, Lawrence Rainey,” whom Sullivan considered a prime suspect in the triple murders.

FBI officials first thought Judge Barnett was the brother of former governor Ross Barnett, then discovered they were cousins. Whether or not the judge presumed too much political accord with J. Edgar Hoover, he underestimated the FBI's territorial instinct by demanding to know leads and sources that Hoover zealously guarded even from his employers in the Justice Department. When Judge Barnett wired Hoover to instruct not only Joe Sullivan and Roy Moore but “all of your agents that have information regarding the death of three civil rights workers…to appear in person at the county courthouse…Monday, September 28, 1964,” Hoover resisted behind the authority of Acting Attorney General Katzenbach. On Friday, Katzenbach wired formal orders to Moore that all FBI agents must refuse to testify, and lawyers scrambled over the weekend to quash the state subpoenas and implement an eight-point contingency plan against possible attempts to jail FBI agents.

With even armed federal agents under such stress, the few local whites sympathetic to the investigation begged not to be called before the federal grand jury. Klan cars were said to follow suspected witnesses on the highway to Biloxi, and there were rumors that Negroes were paying turncoats to lie about Mississippi. Sullivan cajoled witnesses to confirm for the grand jury basic information about the Klan reputations of Rainey and his deputies, then sometimes changed his mind and persuaded attorneys
not
to call witnesses who might suffer beyond the value of their testimony. One advantage for Sullivan was that the agents of his task force, having held their ground through multiple conversations with much of the hostile population, were developing two informants inside the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.

Roy Mitchell, a rookie agent relegated mostly to errand duties, had first reported something odd in the taunts of one garrulous young policeman. Officer Wallace Miller, known in Meridian for impishly flashing the secret Klan sign in news photos, turned out to have pangs over the deadly violence, which ruined his zest for belonging to the Klan. Despite Sullivan's security worries over the combination of an inexperienced handler and a notoriously bumbling informant—“If Wallace Miller walked across a farm with only one cow pie on forty acres, he would step in it”—their conversations had yielded profiles of fellow Klansmen, including nearly a dozen who were said to have gathered at the Long Horn Drive-In that June Sunday night after a posse alarm from the Neshoba klavern, in the next county. Inside the FBI task force, Sullivan prodded his veterans well into September for being outdone by a young street agent, until two of them broke through on what recuiters called the lucky hundredth pitch.